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‘Busy Tonight’ Showrunner Caissie St.Onge Reflects on Her Past, Present and Future in Late Night TV

By Lea Palmieri @littleleap
Published Oct. 23, 2018, 10:59 a.m. ET

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Perhaps it was misguided of me, but I wasn’t expecting the voice of a new showrunner, one with a late night talk show premiering within weeks, to sound so warm and excited over the phone. If I imagined myself in that role, at this point in the process my voice would be on the verge of cracking or disappearing all together from the building stress and exhaustion. But when that voice belongs to Caissie St.Onge, a woman who has been a special example in a lot of ways throughout the course of her impressive career, then it all begins to make sense.

St.Onge is a writer, producer, and diehard Prince fan who has worked her way up through the entertainment ranks, starting at The Late Show with David Letterman and counting positions at The Rosie O’Donnell Show, Best Week Ever, and as the Co-Executive Producer of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen for nine years before being named showrunner of Busy Tonight, hosted by actress and Instagram superstar Busy Philipps, premiering Sunday, October 28 at 10 pm ET/PT on E!.

While Philipps and St.Onge share mutual friends in the comedy world and would chat backstage at Watch What Happens Live where St.Onge noted she was “such a great guest” and that “It was a pleasure getting to know her that way, just one on one,” it was ultimately on social media where their friendship began to grow, and likely how Philipps landed her hosting gig once her relatable confessions on Instagram stories landed her a New Yorker profile last year and grew her followers to a current 1.3 million.

So when Philipps was looking for a showrunner for the new E! series, she reached out to St.Onge, a fellow social media whiz and “East Coast girl” (a Massachusetts native working in New York City for the past 25 years) who was happy at WWHL and not so gung-ho about moving to the West Coast. “At first I was like, ‘Well here’s the thing, I don’t live in Los Angeles,'” St.Onge recalls telling her pal. Instead she offered, “I’ll meet with whoever you want and I’ll tell them everything I know about how to make a talk show and I’ll recommend a billion people because I love you and I believe in you and I want this to be a huge success, so anything I can do from where I am to help you.” And she stuck to her word in ways that were more helpful and inevitable than even she expected. “I went into a couple meetings and everybody was so nice and listened to what I had to say and then they were like, ‘This is all really great, but you know what’d be really good? If you came to work on it.’ So then I started to [ask myself], ‘Can I do this? Could I figure it out so I could go?’ It’s just one of those gradual things that now that I look at it, was probably always gonna happen.”

St.Onge and her family moved out to Los Angeles this past summer to start prepping for Busy Tonight, and if her voice, and the words it speaks, are any indication, she’s not looking back on the decision at all. In fact, she’s only looking forward with a genuine excitement for what’s to come. “Television is supposed to be enjoyable and fun,” St.Onge said. “I think that was always Busy’s goal too. We should have fun making this and it should be fun to watch this.” And so with that sentiment, they have assembled a staff that is not only helping to balance out those females in the entertainment industry ratios, but also “a mix of people that are hard workers and really smart at what they do and super creative, but also just very kind people.”

There seems to be just as much thought put into the behind the scenes work environment of Busy Tonight as there is for the on-air product, which comes from Tina Fey’s Little Stranger production company. “It’s really important because the world is tough, business is tough, so I like to work in a place where I feel like we all have each other’s backs and are cheering each other on,” St.Onge said. “Everyday it’s such a pleasure to hear what a great time everybody’s having. It doesn’t mean the work isn’t hard, it just means that it’s hard work accompanied by everybody encouraging each other.”

Perhaps this comes from the top down, as St.Onge has nothing but lovely, gushing words to say about Philipps, the kind of words you can tell she’s searching for not because she has to say nice things before the show’s premiere, but the kind that make her feel so happy she finds herself repeating many of the same adjectives when describing the host. “She’s wonderful to work with. She always really makes me laugh and gets me in the heart a lot of times. That’s nice to be reminded of, ‘I have feelings about this and I’m moved by this,’ and that happens pretty often.”

St.Onge is certainly not the only one moved by the Philipps, just as the country will be (even more so) once the show premieres, but her staffers are already feeling the feelings too. Philipps and the show’s social media accounts posted a video of her being presented with a cake celebrating the one month mark before the show’s debut, a moment that brought Philipps to tears. “Busy’s a crier, she’s known for that, she talks about it,” St.Onge said. “We put up a video of the cake because it’s Busy, but everybody is like that to each other. It’s like summer camp in a way, everybody’s gotten to know and love one another.” And just as you might return home with a friendship bracelet or trait you picked up from your new friends, Philipps has surely rubbed off on St.Onge in the months they’ve spent working together already. As St.Onge sat in her Hollywood office earlier this month, located just upstairs from the Busy Tonight studio, she noticed it was past 6pm, the time she expected staffers to be heading out for the night. Instead, she heard them chatting away down the hallway. “They were having conversations, laughing, and hanging out and enjoying each other’s company and I got so choked up. I went down to say, ‘It’s so nice to hear all of you getting to know each other and enjoying each others company.’ And I just burst out crying and wound up getting a huge giant hug from the whole team. We’re pretty cute.”

Not just cute, but also satisfying, as Philipps marks the addition of a female joining the exclusive club of late night TV hosts, and with a female showrunner no less. St.Onge tells me, both diplomatically but also genuinely, that “It’s such an honor to be included in that genre. To be a woman with a nighttime talk show doesn’t happen all the time. What Busy brings to it that’s different is that she is first and foremost herself, and that’s what makes it entertaining. She’s a compelling interesting person to watch. She’s funny, she can be serious, she has big feelings about things, she can be opinionated, but also she cares about what other people’s opinions are.” In fact. St.Onge poses that it’s that particular quality that has helped her grow her social audience, and a quality that will hopefully seamlessly translate from the cell phone screen to the TV screen (and even perhaps back to the cell phone screen for viewers who choose to watch the show on their mobile devices). “You always feel like you’re having that conversation with her even when you’re just watching these Instagram stories. She’s bringing herself, and the fact that she is a woman makes her who she is, that’s part of who she is. Everybody’s doing what they already do really well so we’re just gonna try to do what she does really well.”

Already what Philipps will be bringing to the game is significantly different from what the handful of dudes in suits are providing each night: monologue, comedy bit, panel guest, music, repeat. She’s promised for her nightly Sunday through Wednesday shows: guests that are her actual friends, ones she has a rapport with and cares about, and topics that the internet is discussing. St.Onge insisted, “We love the dudes in suits; between all of us here, we know either the hosts of those shows or people that work on those shows and they’re great shows. They’re the shows that we’ve loved for years.” But she’s also tapped into an element audiences crave, one that many of the standard late night hosts have yet to fully understand. “I can only go by myself as an audience member and what I personally enjoy is feeling some kind of involvement with a show, where they’re talking about things that interest me or comfort me or entertain me. A lot of times, there’s these big headlines that everybody’s addressing and you’ll see different takes on them, especially with social media throughout the day. I like to hear what a person really thinks about something. Whether or not I agree with it I always just think it’s interesting. I like taking time to have a conversation and think about things for a moment.”

This is actually a perfect example of how television has evolved over the years St.Onge has worked in the industry. “I love how today, for better or for worse, I think often for better, there’s that feedback loop of knowing what people at home are thinking what they’re interested in, and being able to be like. ‘Hey, I’m interested in that too, let’s talk about that.’ That hasn’t always been the case. At the beginning of my career, we were just guessing what people at home were interested in. I didn’t have email when I first started in television. So that is something that’s an exciting evolution and to be able to use it to have a connection, a real connection with the people who are watching, then that’s everything.”

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This guy is a nice boss. cc: @bravoandy

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It’s also an element that St.Onge truly capitalized on during her time at Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, arguably the most interactive show in late night. Cohen fields questions from listeners on the phone, via social media, and encourages them to participate in the show thought online polls, tweets and more. When looking back at her time on the show, a job St.Onge held for just one week shy of her nine-year anniversary there, she reflected, “I’m proud of so much there. It was such a small show to start off with and such a small team: when I first started there, it was like four people, no joke.” She acknowledges the “hard work and grueling hours” of a talk show airing live five nights a week (Sunday through Thursday) but compliments the host for making her job perhaps slightly easier than other producers might have it. “Andy was so aware of what we were doing and he had been on the other side of a TV show before, so he already knew everything that we were talking about, he was super involved like that.”

The feeling of respect between the two is mutual. When reached for comment by Decider, Andy Cohen said of his former producer, “Caissie had an amazing backlog of late night and talk show history that we relied on to help us navigate often tricky roadblocks that occur when putting on a live show…and a sick and twisted and hilarious sense of humor that made her a perfect fit for the show.”

“Caissie has a sick and twisted and hilarious sense of humor that made her a perfect fit for the show.”—Watch What Happens host and EP Andy Cohen

“I’m proud of the fact that I think it spawns a generation of all these aftershows that are following that format,” St.Onge continued, referring to shows such as AMC’s The Walking Dead post-show, Talking Dead. “When we first started out at Watch What Happens Live, people really thought of it as a Housewives after show and it was and it remains that, but also it became a show where huge guests like Oprah and Meryl Streep, everybody in the world came to be a guest because that’s how fun it was. It’s compelling stuff and Andy’s a great host. He was already great when we first started and I’m proud of how much he even evolved over time, how far he came and how far the show continues to go.”

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So for someone with such an impressive resume, one that is filled with unique moments we as viewers can only begin to imagine, and work experience that spans daytime and late night shows and web content, there’s one real lesson that St.Onge repeatedly comes back to in her work, and one she surely be using and sharing in her latest endeavor. “If it’s funny to you, chances are it’s funny to someone,” she shared. “If something’s making you laugh, don’t talk yourself out of that idea, don’t say, ‘Oh I think it’s funny but everyone else will think it’s stupid.’ If you think it’s funny, probably someone else will think it’s funny at least enough to jump onboard with you and be like, ‘Here’s how we can make this even more enjoyable to watch.’ If you like it and it makes your heart sing a little bit, then share it with someone else and see if it has any effect from there. That’s the big lesson that I’ve learned, is not to shut down my own thinking because usually it’ll at least open a door to something good if it’s not already there yet.”

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